This correlation — empty factories and full offices — was not accidental. The scarcer goods were, the harder it became to control their distribution, since the black market thrived on shortages, so that the state increased its intervention. The result was the proliferation of overlapping offices within the economy. Apart from the central commissariats (e.g. food, labour, transport) and their local organs in the Soviets, there was the network of organs subordinate to the VSNKh, the All-Russian Council for the Economy, including its local economic councils, the manufacturing trusts and the special departments for the regulation of individual commodities (Glavki). Then there were also the ad hoc agencies set up by the regime for military supply, like the Council of Labour and Defence or such acronymic monsters as Chusosnabarm (the Extraordinary Agency for the Supply of the Army), which in principle could overrule the other economic organs. Of course, in practice, there was only confusion and rivalry between the different organs. The more the state tried to centralize control, the less real control it actually had. Lower down the scale, at factory level, the bureaucracy proved just as ineffective. For every 100 factory workers there were 16 factory officials by 1920. In some factories the figure was much higher: of the 7,000 people employed at the famous Putilov metal plant, only 2,000 were blue-collar workers; the rest were petty officials and clerks. Such were the material advantages of a white-collar job, not least access to food and goods in short supply, that such parasites were bound to grow in number as the economic crisis deepened. All the strike resolutions of these years complained about factory officials ‘living off the backs of the workers’.59
Lenin liked to claim that the problem of bureaucratism was a legacy of the tsarist era. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy inherited the culture of the tsarist one. But by 1921 it was also ten times bigger than the tsarist state. There was some continuity of the personnel, especially in the central organs of the state. Over half the bureaucrats in the Moscow offices of the commissariats in August 1918 had worked in some branch of the administration before October 1917. Many of the central organs also employed armies of young bourgeois ladies, most of whom had never worked before, to do the petty paper work. One eye-witness recalls them walking by their hundreds every morning through the snow from the Moscow suburbs to the centre of the city. There they worked all day in unheated offices, their wet shoes and clothes never drying out, before walking back to the suburbs to help feed their hungry relatives. Otherwise, however, the lower you went down the apparatus the more it was dominated by the lower classes entering officialdom for the first time. The majority of these elements, especially in provincial towns, came from the lower-middle classes — what Marxists called the ‘petty bourgeoisie’: bookkeepers, shop assistants and petty clerks; small-time traders and artisans; activists of the co-operatives; engineers and factory officials; and all those who might have once worked as technicians or professionals in the zemstvos and municipal organs. As for the workers, in whose name the regime had been founded, they represented a very small proportion of those who entered the Soviet bureaucracy: certainly no more than 10 per cent (based on those with blue-collar occupations before 1917). Even in the management of industry workers made up less than one-third of officials. It is reasonable to conclude that most of these lower-middle strata were attracted to the Soviet regime less by their own revolutionary ideals than by the relatively high wages and short working-hours of its officials. It was certainly a more attractive prospect than the cold and hunger that awaited those from the older bourgeoisie who chose instead to turn their backs on it. The typical day of a Soviet official was spent gossiping in corridors, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, or standing in queues for the special rations that went only to the Soviet élite.60
